Meta

dichotomy

This weekend was Imagine RIT. We had our game shown in Webb Auditorium, a large venue that gave us a lot of freedom. But it also put a lot of pressure on us to have a compelling exhibit. And after no small amount of setbacks, I think we succeeded.

The night before we were set to present, tragedy struck. Our entire map failed to load, lighting failed to build, and packaging the game resulted in errors. Additionally, the computers we were given didn’t have the correct version of the Unreal engine and the only internet source available to update them stopped working. Basically, everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

But thanks to the collective fortitude of our team, especially our dedicated programmer Kyler, and the technical insight of RIT’s CIAS Tech office, we were able to pull it off.

In the end, we had hundreds of visitors. We have away all 320 of the fliers we printed and had a bunch of people sign up for our mailing list.

I want to thank everyone who worked so hard to make that event a success. Being our first-ever public demo, it was completely terrifying and the numerous setbacks didn’t help. But we made it, somehow, and we are ready to start looking towards the future.

Here’s this week’s breakdown. I worked 39 hours to help bring the exhibit together. At least, I think so. It could very well be more. But it’s a bit hard to keep track of time when you stay awake for 35 hours straight.

As predicted, this past week was pretty crazy. I spent a ton of time rendering, editing, re-rendering, finding inspiration, tweaking, more tweaking, even more tweaking, a bunch more rendering, and not sleeping. But the result was worth it. My presentation went well, I got some good feedback, and I got a chance to show off my work. And, as promised, here’s the video I created as part of my presentation:

But despite all the craziness of last week, I can’t slow down. Next Saturday is Imagine RIT and, as I mentioned two weeks ago, we will be showing off the game for the first time at the event. So this week I am going to be splitting my time between working on promotional materials and finishing up/implementing the assets that will be included in the demo. This is, of course, a very early and rough build of the game so not everything will make the cut. Additionally, many of the things that we are going to include, especially FX and sounds, will be temporary as we have only barely touched on those so far. Still, it’s really exciting to get a chance to put the game out there for the first time and to see how people feel about it.

Be sure to visit us Saturday, May 2 at RIT James E. Booth Hall in Webb Auditorium.

This week is going to be the most exciting, stressful, and overall hectic week of this project thusfar. Why, you ask? Because this is the last week of my thesis. Well, sort of. Technically we still have the rest of the year to work on touch-ups and stretch goals, but at the end of this week we are holding our final presentations. So for all intents and purposes any work I do on Dichotomy after Friday will be as an independent game developer. Exciting, huh?

This is the only frame of my breakdown video that I will be releasing prior to my presentation on Friday.

After what seemed like a week years of laying out UVs (actually a few days), a month of baking maps (more like 12 hours) and a year of importing/tweaking input maps (probably 2 hours, which is a long time to sit and stare at dDo’s loading screen) I finally have first draft textures for the Mountain Goat completed.

Ignore the transparency error; I’m using 3Do to preview here, since I haven’t set up my preview render environments yet.

As the end of the semester draws ever closer, my schedule seems to get exponentially busier. There’s a ton of stuff I want to get finished before our thesis defenses at the end of the month. Additionally, we were accepted into Imagine RITas exhibitors so there’s a bunch of presentation materials I want to create by then. Expect more information on that in the future.

One of the things I’m most excited about is the Mountain Goat. I talked about this vehicle a couple weeks ago and since then I’ve been working tirelessly on the model. The mid-res model is completely finished and I’m nearly finished with the high-detail and game-ready meshes.

You may be wondering why I’m posting my weekly update today instead of on Sunday. The reason is that my week ends a bit early this time around, thanks to RIT’s spring break. As with most breaks I am headed home for the week which means I can’t work on any assets for the game, aside from sketches. In addition to that, yesterday was Creative Industry Day, otherwise known as “the closest thing to a job fair that art students have.” So most of my week was spent preparing my portfolio and other branded materials for this event.

But there is some good news! We finally have a new title for the game, and we made sure there are no existing games that use the same name. The new name for The Game Formerly Known As Parallax is:

Dichotomy

Catchy, huh? I like it, anyway. It’s much better than a lot of other suggestions that were tossed around. There’s no fancy logo for the new title yet, but as soon as that is completed I will be sure to show it to you guys.

I’ll be tagging all future posts with Dichotomy, and I will retroactively tag the old ones too. The Parallx tag will stay on the old posts to make them just as easy to find.

That’s all the updates I have this week. I’m not going to bother with a breakdown as I don’t have an accurate record of the amount of time I worked on Dichotomy this week but rest assured it was very little. When I get back, though, it’s back to full steam ahead!

This week was really busy for the Parallax team, or rather the Game Formerly Known As Parallax team. Yep, that’s right. Parallax is no more. A game completely unaffiliated with us was recently released under the title Parallax. Since we don’t want to give our game the same name as an existing title, we have decided to choose a new name. That new name is…